Clinton’s Foreign Policy

Unlike in domestic policy, where candidates fight each other with dueling white papers, most of the time there just aren’t very many specific, detailed foreign policy issues on which candidates disagree. It’s very much a rhetorical battlespace, and one where it’s very difficult to draw sharp distinctions.

There’s a lot of truth to that, especially with regard to Edwards and Obama. I do think Hillary Clinton laid out a reasonably clear vision in her January 2006 speech to Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. The way I read the speech, Clinton has very serious tactical disagreements with the Bush administration, but on some level agrees with the basic Bushian idea that actively seeking the political transformation of the Arab world ought to be America’s key priority. Certainly, given the opportunity to argue that there’s been something fundamentally misguided with the Bush approach to the post-9/11 world, she didn’t choose to do so, expressing instead qualms about the ways Bush has handled this or that, but support for the general orientation of American policy.